open source systems for libraries

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Tellico is another one that's seen steady improvements since the last post about it here. The latest version is 1.3.5, and release notes for this and prior releases are on the project's home page, which also highlights the variety of binary distros available.

"The PHP Web interface supports live links for keywords, authors, and periodicals which are displayed as "tag clouds". Automatic format detection from local files is done, and has a type-sensitive form for editing data. RefDB implements all SRU operations (explain, searchRetrieve, scan) with MODS output, and conforms to CQL Level 2. Namespaced XML output allows processing of schema-based TEI P5 and DocBook V.5.0 documents. Raw bibliographies were added. Searching for and styling of less-common fields was improved."

It's been a long while since I've written about Tellico, the excellent personal bibliographic collection manager. But since the last post here, it's undergone a steady series of improvements and remains a terrific desktop app with super all-purpose biblio-fu. The latest version is 1.2.14.

Hammer writes: "We're delighted to announce the release of another new product: Simple2ZOOM, a sort of universal Swiss Army gateway that proxies between Z39.50, SRU, SRU/POST and SRW. Although nearly all testing so far has been with Z39.50-to-SRU configurations, it ought to work with pretty much any combination of these protocols on the front- and back-ends. The software essentially combines the qualities of two existing packages, ZOOM and SimpleServer into one universal protocol gateway.

Simple2ZOOM is free-as-in-freedom, open source, software. It is distributed under the same terms as Perl, that is, either under the GNU GPL (General Public Licence) or the Artistic Licence -- your choice.

Simple2ZOOM is implemented in Perl, as a tiny script that calls the Net::Z3950::Simple2ZOOM Perl module. It is this module that is distributed, and it's freely available on CPAN here.

We would like to gratefully acknowledge the National Library of Australia for providing funding that enabled us to add lots of the functionality and bring this product up to a releasable standard."

Crosswalking is a concise book for library programmers who want to learn to use MARC4J to process bibliographic data. MARC4J is an open source software library for working with MARC, MARCXML and related bibliographic standards in Java. The library is designed to bridge the gap between MARC and XML.

It is divided into the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Reading Data

Chapter 1 provides a short introduction about MARC formats and then focuses on reading MARC and MARCXML data. This chapter also explains how to create and update records and it demonstrates how to pre-process the input to convert MODS to MARC.

Chapter 2, Writing Data

Chapter 2 concentrates on the details of writing MARC and MARCXML data and how to post-process the output to convert MARC to MODS.

Chapter 3, MARC4J and JAXP

Chapter 3 explores integration with some important Java XML API's including JAXP, SAX and DOM. It demonstrates how to write the result to a DOM document, how to format XML output using a dedicated XML serializer, how to build pipelines using XSLT and how to use the SAX interface as an alternative to XSLT.

Chapter 5 focuses on building an SRU Search/Retrieve Web application using the various MARC4J interfaces and classes to process MARC data and using Lucene for indexing and searching.

Appendix A, MARC4J API Summary

Appendix A provides a summary of the core MARC4J interfaces and classes.

Appendix B, Command-line Reference

Appendix B documents the command-line programs included in the MARC4J API.

This book provides useful information for both developers learning about MARC4J for the first time and developers returning for reference and more advanced material. The chapters provide many reusable examples, while appendixes provide a reference to the API and the command-line utilities.

refbase is a web-based bibliographic manager for scientific literature, references and citations. A new release of the refbase package is available from SourceForge.

This release offers major function enhancements and bugfixes. Batch import from various bibliographic formats (including BibTeX, Endnote, RIS, ISI and MODS XML) is now supported, as is import from a PubMed ID. An OpenDocument Spreadsheet for use with OpenOffice.org can be exported and formatted citation lists can be generated as HTML, RTF, PDF, or LaTeX. A SRU/W service as well as support for unAPI, OpenURL and COinS metadata have been added. These allow the data to be used by the next generation of bibliographic clients. A new command line client is also included.

Index Data has released version 1.01 of their SimpleServer toolkit for implementing information retrieval servers in Perl, now with support for SRW/SRU.

The built-in CQL parser makes it possible to write a single set of 'glue' routines for your backend database, and have instant support for both Z39.50, SRW, and SRU. Existing SimpleServer-based servers can implement SRW/SRU simply by upgrading to the latest version of the software and adding configuration to determine the mapping of the CQL query language.

ZOOM-Perl makes it easy to write clients for Z39.50, SRU, and SRW. It supports mapping incoming MARC records to MARCXML in UTF-8 to facilitate conversion and display, for example using some of the XSLT stylesheets made available by the LoC. Under the hood, ZOOM-Perl is based on the YAZ toolkit, and shares the reliability and interoperability of that toolkit.

Sebastian writes: "Version 1.0 of the YAZ proxy has been released. The major version jump signifies that the software is robust and has been thoroughly hardened in production. The YAZ Proxy can be used for a number of different purposes, but perhaps one of its most interesting features is that it can make any Z39.50 server look like a (SRU/SRW) webservice. If you have a Z39.50 server you'd like to access but you're intimidated by the protocol, use the proxy and you can submit queries like this
and get results back in XML. A SOAP-based protocol (SRW) is also suported. The proxy is used by the Library of Congress and other major libraries."